CALL FOR SHORT PAPER

Organisers: Edeltraud ASPÖCK | Guntram GESER, Austria

In this round table we will discuss the present differences in the landscape of digital archives across Europe and options for researchers in countries without adequate solutions for archaeological data.
Data archives ensure long-term preservation and dissemination of data for re-use in further research. However, not all European countries have an adequate archive for archaeological data. In fact, such archives only exist in a few countries, while in others appropriate solutions are only being created at present, or there is a lack of awareness for the need of data preservation and access.
In Austria, the e-Infrastructures Austria project aims to prepare a repository infrastructure across the universities and other research institutions. The results of a 2015 survey among Austrian researchers confirmed the need for repositories and data specialists to support researchers in data management. At the same time, calls from the main scientific research funding body in Austria (FWF Austrian Science Fund) already push towards open data, although in past calls long-term archiving of data was difficult to fulfill – at least for archaeologists – because of the lack of appropriate data archives in Austria.

In the round table the following questions will be addressed:

  • How have repositories for archaeological data been developed, e.g. political, organizational and other drivers (exemplary cases from different European countries)?
  • How is archaeological data different to data in the other humanities and hence has ‘special’ requirements?
  • What options are there for long-term archiving of archaeological data if there is no appropriate national archive?

We invite five short presentations (5–10 minutes) on the above or related questions to represent different approaches/case studies and to provide a basis for our discussion.

The round table is connected to the session “Preservation as a foundation for the reuse of data”.